After you've admired the tulips

The tulips at Wellington's Botanic Gardens are perfect cups of buttery yellow and blood red and streaked lipstick pink right now. I couldn't miss them when I drove past today. I recommend a visit this Sunday, and when you're sated with all that colour, pop down Glenmore Street to the elegant white nineteenth century cottage on St. Mary's Street for a quieter aesthetic experience [take a left before you hit the Bowen St. intersection and head up at a 60 degree angle.]

Here's Kirsty Gunn on the cottage in the latest issue of Booknotes:

I felt like I was coming home. Everything about the place was familiar - from the New Zealand timber floorboards to the very positioning of the sash windows that looked out to a garden of native trees and hydrangeas.

The link to the rest of that piece is up on the Randell Cottage website.

Randell Cottage is one of the city's oldest cottages built by William and Sarah Randell in 1867 and home to them and their ten children.  Now it houses a French writer over summer and a NZ writer over winter. Kirsty Gunn has just left and French-speaking Iranian exile Fariba Hachtroudi is about to arrive. A team of Randell Cottage Friends and Trustees, of which I am one, will be on hand to show you around.

And back to those tulips. Looking at this photograph [thanks to panoramio.com] reminds me of my first days in New Zealand at the age of four. We'd arrived from Bermuda by ship and were staying at the Sharella hotel - pictured behind the flowers - until we found a house to rent. I seem to remember tulips then, or perhaps they came later. It was cold and windy, for sure, but then after the hot, still, crayon-coloured world of Bermuda, that was no a surprise. I do remember the sensations on moving here of a world leached of colour, and buffetted. My memories switch suddenly from colour to black and white for a while. The edges of things were less clear.

Once we settled in, we walked alot in the Botanic Gardens on regular Sunday outings. There were bagpipers [I wanted to be one], dancers in clogs [that too], ducks, flowers, the longest slide in the world, a cable car. It was a Wonderland. Later, my friend Deborah and I would walk through the Gardens to Wellington Girls College - in bare feet when it was hot [Deb was a bit of a hippy.] Then there were late night visits with boyfriends to see the glow-worms, and one boyfriend who took me there so he could take romantic photographs beside the magnolias. Or I thought that was the plan. I was surprised to find, when they'd been developed, that he'd taken almost a whole film of the trees, including close-ups of their perfect creamy blooms, and only one with me in it.

Dear reader, I married him.

See you at Randell Cottage on Sunday.

Come and hear French novelist Olivier Bleys

On Thursday 12 March 5.50-7 pm
Alliance Française
level 3, 78 Victoria Street, Wellington.

Author of more than a dozen historical novels on subjects as diverse as the construction of the Eiffel Tower, a tulip merchant in the Netherlands and the introduction of the piano to Brazil, prizewinning writer Olivier Bleys will discuss his work in English and read extracts from published and unpublished work (in French with English translation by Jean Anderson).

Olivier is French writer-in-residence at Thorndon’s Randell Cottage here in Wellington which I'm involved with - there is a French writer for six months funded by the French Government and a NZ writer for six months funded by Creative NZ. The next writer up is kiwi ex-pat Kirsty Gunn (Rain, Featherstone).

Olivier's currently working on a contemporary novel set in New Zealand about an astronomer, a meteorite and an art exhibition…

All welcome, refreshments provided.
RSVP to 04 472 1272 by 10 March appreciated.

See you there!

Bullet Points

*The winner of the Booker Prize this year is about to be announced. Whatever it is I haven't read it. I've usually assailed one or two of them, but not this year. Linda Grant's The Clothes on Their Backs (Virago) is the one I am most attracted to but wonder if Sebastian Barry's The Secret Scripture (Faber and Faber) might not win? Although, I think it would be exciting to see first-timers like Aravind Adiga or Steve Toltz take it away.


I read Anne Enright's The Gathering purely because it won the Booker last year, although I was nearly put off reading it because it pipped a certain NZ author (sad but true) and because nay-sayers called it a depressing read. I picked it up at last because one of the judges said it had the best last line he'd ever read, and because reading the first two pages the prose struck me as exquisite. It was.


*This lovely book has arrived. I mentioned in my bird post on Monday that I was delighted to discover another writer/blogger Gondal-Girl across the ditch is reading this memoir. She, like me, is fascinated by birds. Already I am captivated by the cover of Corvus and the fine production by Granta. I'm reviewing it for National Radio on October 30 - the day after Wisdom by Andrew Zuckerman and the day before Memories, Dreams and Reflections by Marianne Faithful.



*And while I'm on about birds again - here are the stunning velvet birds my friend Fifi makes which I also mentioned in the last post. They are simply lovely, and she says on her blog she has some left and will take commissions if the one you want isn't available.


*Meanwhile, Graham Beattie has graciously asked me how the Open Day went at the Randell Cottage for writers in Wellington on Sunday. As I explained in an earlier post, the historic cottage is home to NZ and French writers for six months each a year. In between writers, we open the doors for the public and for the cottage supporters. (I chair the cottage's Friends' group).


We also hope the Open Day might attract interested writers who want to try and imagine themselves working there. We are calling for applications for the NZ writer now.


So here's the report: It was an exquisite Wellington day with people swimming at Days Bay, and others visiting the last of the tulips at the Botanical Gardens up the road from the cottage. So you can guess we didn't get too many out-doorsy types, young families, or garden fans.


Our visitors were people who liked books, people who liked writing, people who liked historic cottages and Francophiles. Amongst them were City Councillor Ian McKinnon and a number of Foundation Friends of the cottage who donated money to the residency when it began seven years ago. They included NZ Books Abroad's Louise Wrightson, former diplomat now Nine-to-Noon-book-reviewer Bruce Brown, children's book reviewer and assessor Barbara Murison, and arts patron Jeanette Bornholdt. (The list of Foundation Friends runs to 30 people plus.)

Internationally recognised children's author Beverley Randell Price, whose family donated the cottage, was also at the Open Day along with a number of members of the Trust and its Friends committee. Cottage enthusiast and member of both the Trust and the Friends, Fiona Kidman, was on deck all day!

I turned up at 2 pm, nicely placed for the 4 pm drinks for the cottage's supporters. We were thrilled to be joined by composer Jack Body who is involved with the Douglas Lilburn House. One project the Friends' group is working on is to link the Randell Cottage more closely to the two other residencies in Thorndon: the Lilburn, and the Rita Angus Cottage, as well as the Katherine Mansfield birthplace. So watch this space.

Over and out (until the Booker results).

Writers' cottage open to visit

The Randell Cottage Writers Trust is having an Open Day this Sunday 12 October from 11-4pm.
I am on the Friends Committee and will be on deck from 2-4pm to welcome visitors to this historic Wellington cottage which is home for two writers every year for six months each: one from New Zealand and one from France.



Come to: 14 St Mary’s Street, Thorndon.

Randell Cottage is one of Wellington’s oldest restored cottages. Take the opportunity to explore this corner of our city’s history, and if you're a writer you might like to come along and imagine yourself working there... We're calling for NZ writers to apply now.

Here's what you get: a cottage rent free with free electricity and broadband etc, plus a stipend of $2,500 a month funded by Creative NZ. We are currently trying to value the whole package but it must surely be worth around $30,000 for the six months (given the central location of the cottage.) It is just a walk away from the National Library and the central city.

NZ writer Jennifer Compton has just left the cottage after a successful six months writing a novel and finishing off a book of poems and another of essays (this is not a photo of Jen! it must be of one of the Price family who so kindly donated the cottage.)

French author Olivier Beys arrives in October for the summer. For more on Jennifer's visit go to the Friends' newsletters here and here.